Nobody ever seems to want to listen to my pet idea about this
:), but I would like to suggest again that there's such a
thing as the "non-hardboiled private eye novel". For example,
I recently read Margaret Millar's HOW LIKE AN ANGEL. Fine
book, and the protagonist is a kind of pi, but it's not a
hardboiled book (rather a psychological thriller dealing with
religion). I don't know about Sue Grafton, but I would also
put Parker and Marcia Muller into this catagory.
To me this idea is sort of counter-intuitive -- in that we
keep identifying "pi" with "hardboiled" -- but the more you
look at the work itself it starts to make sense. I've come
around on Parker, for instance -- I used to hate him just
because his work didn't fit my sense of what hb was. Well, I
still don't think he's hb, but once I freed myself from this
idea that every pi novel *has* to be hardboiled I found
myself enjoying his work for it's obvious virtues: humor and
good dialog, mainly. (A lot of the later Scudders also seem
to me to belong to this catagory, although I haven't read
EVERYBODY DIES.)
Just my two cents, doug
===== Doug Bassett
dj_bassett@yahoo.com
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